Friday, 22 October 2010

This week has been a week of solid work on Rock ‘til you drop by day and abuse of various plywood boards by night. Good fun and a nice change from travelling too much. I do think I’ve read just a bit too much this week about posture and it’s impact on people who choose to spend large volumes of time hanging from bits of plywood. It’s a strange thing to spend all day reading about how much damage you can do from your sport, and then heading out to go and do some more all evening long!

Seriously though, I’ve learned a LOT about the likely sources of my own elbow problems over the recent years and have sufficiently terrified myself into including an enthusiastic battery of stretches and weird looking calisthenics to sort out my various imbalances. It's brilliant to actually know what the problem was!!!

Researching a book that crosses so many scientific and practical fields of expertise is no overnight task, and next week I’ll no doubt repeat this one and many before it: - buy expensive textbooks (the most expensive so far was £200!), spend the wee small hours tweaking searches through journals with nasty pictures of mangled elbows and then try to fit this with my knowledge of climbing and the elbow, finger and shoulder destroying ways of keen climbers.

But for two days, I have a break. I’m off with Claire to the Edinburgh Mountain Film Festival for some good events - first up: Diff’s lecture “Climbers I’ve shot, and some I’d like to shoot” which will be a laugh, then the Premiere of the film he shot of our repeat of the famous ‘Pinnacle’ week on Ben Nevis, 50 years to the day since they did it. Then on Sunday it’s the debate on the ethics of adventure. See you there maybe..

5 comments:

After having independently navigated a way through injury prevention and rehabilitation I'm indeed eager for the new book. To comment on the etiology of elbow troubles, my own case of medial epicondylitis seems to have developed and of-and-on recurred as a consequence of doing loads of typing/ mousing. I judge climbing and fingerboarding did have a critical role in its initial development, but its recurrence has been correlated most strongly with periods of intensive computer use, independent of training load. Cheers mate!

I found out which of the muscles around my shoulder were too short and how this was affecting the position of my scapula and humerus. It's obviously going to be different problems for different people, but I'm doing a detailed section on this in the book. ETA? - I'm working hard on it and making good progress. I don't know when it'll be finished though.

Well, very interesting to know which muscles are involved in your faulty scapula and hunmerus position, but If you let me to invite you to go beyond the muscles and tendons, please, check the nerves who engage them. They also suffer inflamation and pain giving a bad signal for a properly muscle work and mechanical function. In all its track from the spine to the myofascial tissues it can be damaged (D. Buttler, M. Shacklock). And about the posture, many interesting stuff is possible to find, nowadays Pavel Kolar's work is so interesting (his core/breathing approach is fantastic). Also after the injury, the erroneous pattern movment learnt while the injury or perhaps that causes it (engram) is still stored in your brain, it needs to be erased and built up the properly one.Sorry if you find thick these words but after some resarch years the injuries drive me in this direction.I hope they could help you in some way.